Aura HD Pages only turn backwards sometimes

[narual]

Hi there! I've had my Kobo Aura HD for several months now, and I'm mostly happy with it (especially after the firmware update to help support 1-handed reading, though I wish it was more customizable, since I'd rather the left hand be the opposite of the right hand, as it was on my Nook).

I'm having a couple of continual really annoying issues with page turning, though.

Issue 1) The kobo will briefly not respond to touches, and then it will turn pages, sometimes several at once, but typically just 1 at a time... but it turns them back instead of forward, no matter where on the screen I touch. Previously I'd have to shut the kobo off completely (sleep didn't usually fix it), but recently I've noticed that if I rub my whole palm across the screen a few times, it freezes up completely for a minute or so, and then returns to normal page turning. It's not possible to access any menus or anything when this happens - touching the spot that would normally access controls just turns the page. The sleep and glow on/off buttons work normally.

Issue 2) The kobo will freeze up, sometimes for only a few moments, sometimes for a couple of minutes at a time. Similar to above, the physical buttons still work. Shutting down and turning back on usually fixes this. Overstimulating the screen or whatever the whole palm touch is doing has no effect with this problem.

The kobo choked when I tried putting the microSD card with my complete epub collection on it back when I first got it, so right now I just have about 50 books in the device memory and no SD card installed.

Has anyone run across this before, and is there a fix?

Thanks!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by narual

Hi there! I've had my Kobo Aura HD for several months now, and I'm mostly happy with it (especially after the firmware update to help support 1-handed reading, though I wish it was more customizable, since I'd rather the left hand be the opposite of the right hand, as it was on my Nook).

I'm having a couple of continual really annoying issues with page turning, though.

Issue 1) The kobo will briefly not respond to touches, and then it will turn pages, sometimes several at once, but typically just 1 at a time... but it turns them back instead of forward, no matter where on the screen I touch. Previously I'd have to shut the kobo off completely (sleep didn't usually fix it), but recently I've noticed that if I rub my whole palm across the screen a few times, it freezes up completely for a minute or so, and then returns to normal page turning. It's not possible to access any menus or anything when this happens - touching the spot that would normally access controls just turns the page. The sleep and glow on/off buttons work normally.

Issue 2) The kobo will freeze up, sometimes for only a few moments, sometimes for a couple of minutes at a time. Similar to above, the physical buttons still work. Shutting down and turning back on usually fixes this. Overstimulating the screen or whatever the whole palm touch is doing has no effect with this problem.

What I've noticed is that when I swipe to turn pages, occasionally it appears to be seen as an attempt to highlight/select text instead. On non-Kobo epubs, about 1 time in 15 that I attempt an annotation, I either wait a couple of minutes for the highlight/add note popup or use the power switch or sleep cover to trigger sleep mode.

Originally Posted by narual

The kobo choked when I tried putting the microSD card with my complete epub collection on it back when I first got it, so right now I just have about 50 books in the device memory and no SD card installed.

Has anyone run across this before, and is there a fix?

When I last did a factory reset, with ~2600 books on the SD card, it took hours to process all the ebooks (I wiped the uSD card and transferred the entire library with Calibre to catch up any changes I had made, plugged the H2O into a USB power supply and left it overnight). This is with ebooks that have at least been through Sigil/Flightcrew and epubcheck to allow me to repair non-compliant ebooks.

When I first tried transferring epubs to my Kobo, I found that ebooks with errors would hang the processing stage. Sometimes a restart would allow continuing with the bad epub being skipped but then some of them caused issues when I was trying to read.

One workaround is to transfer the ebooks in smaller batches so the processing time is shorter and locating problematic ebooks is easier.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by narual

Has anyone run across this before, and is there a fix?

Hi narual,
I have the page-turning issue with my Aura HD on a recurrent basis, though it doesn't seem to be consistent. There are periods when they do occur pretty much every time I touch the device, and other times when it won't happen for days on end. I've come to wonder whether it might be due to micro-movements of my fingers in tapping or swiping -- I'd always thought I had fairly steady hands, no apparent trembles, but I'm puzzled that I do get these problems but others don't appear to report them very much. I make a point of keeping the screen and the inside of the bezel dust-free, but I still get the problems.

So I do wonder if it could possibly be firmware-related. Over the last few months I seem to have become the Flying Dutchman of Factory Resets, having had faulty hardware replaced under warranty by also-faulty hardware twice now, with more than one failed firmware upgrades on registering the devices (through USB, not wireless). But I've consistently found that once the firmware is successfully installed, there's a grace period of maybe a month after a new installation when these problems don't show ... but then they always seem to creep back.

At least, that's how it seems to me. Today, I was getting a new one: taps on the screen would bring up actions that would seem completely unrelated to where the contact occurred -- for instance, a swipe from the left side of the screen to turn back a page brought up the font dialog. Weird.

Maybe it is just my finger movements, but unless someone else uses my device and has no problems at the time I'm seeing these issues, it's hard to isolate the cause.

[narual]

Update: This hasn't happened in quite a while. I think 3.15 might have fixed it. Or maybe it only happens in certain epub files and I haven't read any of those books since spring.

[Mellobob]

Originally Posted by narual

Update: This hasn't happened in quite a while. I think 3.15 might have fixed it. Or maybe it only happens in certain epub files and I haven't read any of those books since spring.

Nope (or you are just lucky ... or I am not ). Happened to me yesterday. Sometimes I wonder if I'm losing my mind reading the same page over and over again!

BTW, I'm on 3.17.something

[karyan]

I have been experiencing issue #1 (paging backwards regardless of where on the screen I touch).

I have always had problems with paging forward not always working (one tap doesn't work, then the next does, but might skip ahead two pages) but I've lived with this.

The backwards paging is a lot more annoying - making the eReader unusable.

The backwards paging started out of the blue and continued after the latest update (3.17.3). I haven't identified any triggering event, but it occurs several times a day.

[meeera]

Another thing to just check is that you've cleaned thoroughly in the crevices around the bezel on all sides, where the IR sensors are.

[narual]

I finally bit the bullet and wiped everything off, did a factory reset, and updated from there to the latest software. I also found a plugin for calibre that converts epubs to kepub format, and I'm using that for most books now.

I get occasional non-responsive Issues now but not as often, and more importantly, the really irritating "kobo completely freezes up during startup if it's not plugged in to a charger" issue is finally gone.